Mashups are bringing SOA closer to the people.
ebizQ just published IBM's Smart Strategies for Web 2.0 newsletter, which includes an interview with Larry Bowden, vice president of portals and mashups for IBM Lotus, and Kareem Yusuf, director of product management for IBM WebSphere. The newsletter is available to all registered ebizQ members here.
Here are some excerpts from the conversation I had with Larry and Kareem on the growing convergence between SOA and mashups:
Q: Are Web 2.0 mashups a way to extend SOA?
Yusuf: Service-oriented architecture is actually an architectural approach to how you design reusable components – it’s fundamentally a set of principles. The same principles apply to mashups and Web 2.0, as well. Often, mashups by their nature, being lightweight Web apps, are related to Web 2.0-style technologies, things like Ajax, JSON, RESTful interfaces, as lightweight mechanisms to create these apps. And these tie back to SOA, we view Web 2.0 technologies as really allowing you to extend your service-oriented architecture, and provide simplified access to those resources that are created.
Q: Are mashups technically a form of “composite application” that we have seen deployed as part of SOA in recent years?
Bowden: A mashup takes what has been done on the enterprise side with portals for quite some years – developers building composite applications from enterprise applications – but moving it out to a user base where people without programming backgrounds can assemble composite applications. New Web 2.0 applications are allowing us to do that. SOA has always been about agility, about speed, about how you can reuse content. With mashups, that agility is moved out to the business user.
Q: What are the differences between mashups and SOA composite applications – especially those intended to support mission-critical business processes?
Bowden: Mashups have a lightweight nature and a just-good-enough capability that allows you to get a problem solved without the rigor that goes along with mission-critical elements. They may be used for only one project, or maybe reused into different areas. The user determines how long they keep the application around, and then maybe discard it.
Q: What are the challenges people are encountering?
Bowden: We see some technical challenges in security and interoperability. There’s a lot of content people want to assemble into mashups, and once it gets assembled, and they decide to share it, there may be security issues – do other users have rights to share the mashup? You need to have a system and a structure that prevents confidential information from being shared with those who shouldn’t be seeing it. Also, you need to adopt a culture of sharing. Culture and governance will be different from company to company – the one-size hammer will not fit every nail.
Q: What’s the best way to measure the success of Web 2.0-style applications and mashups?
Bowden: The key measures are speed and agility. The pure speed with which you can build a mashup – versus turning in a request to IT to building a standard app, with all the associated costs and expenses, with overhead and security and testing – will be one measure. With that speed will come the cost savings. The agility will come when you can leverage something that somebody else built that you can take and modify within a very short period of time. The time that it takes you to even add new feeds is dramatically lower than any other programming models we have had in the past.
Yusuf: Success will be measured by tracking the IT backlog. IT knows how much they cannot provide. How the backlog is being reduced will play a big role in measuring the benefits of Web 2.0 projects and investments. This is about enabling people to take their destiny into their own hands in terms of productivity, flexibility, and agility.
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